Defense mechanisms

What are people most afraid of? What do our dreams mean? Are we natural-born racists? What makes us happy? What are the causes and cures of mental illness? This course tries to answer these questions and many others, providing a comprehensive overview of the scientific study of thought and behavior. It explores topics such as perception, communication, learning, memory, decision-making, persuasion, emotions, and social behavior. We will look at how these aspects of the mind develop in children, how they differ across people, how they are wired-up in the brain, and how they break down due to illness and injury.

SM

This is very basic course on pshchology but I enjoy studying it for personal reason. I think many learners will take advantages of this course for whatever field of studay and work they are doing.

NH

Aug 26, 2019

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Absolutely love the way the course is explained, it's very clear and very easy to imagine and picture the situations. The author speaks slowly making space for understanding the content.

從本節課中

Foundations

In this module, you will learn about foundational psychological theories and findings in psychology. We will start with the discovery that our mental lives have a physical basis, introducing the field of neuroscience. And then we will turn to two major psychological theories that have come to shape the world that we now live in—Freud’s psychodynamic theory and Skinner’s theory of behaviorism.

教學方

Paul Bloom

Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Yale University

腳本

So, suppose you survive these developmental stages and you're now an adult, and you're not out of the woods yet, there are all sorts of challenges and problems you're faced with. One problem is that your Id is sending up all sorts of desires, all sorts of weird sick stuff, sexual and violent, and these are forbidden by the super ego. It's not merely that you can't act upon them, so you shouldn't be thinking them, and so they get pushed down or repressed. You could even imagine a sort of a metaphor of you pushing down something, like some water spraying out from leaks on a floor and you're jamming towels over it or something like that. Some of this repressed stuff, as in my fine metaphor, spills out, you can't contain everything. For Freud, it spills out in jokes and slips of the tongue and in dreams. But also for Freud, there are other ways to cope with these desires. There's other ways to repress them and these are what Freud described as defense mechanisms. They defend the ego from this terrible stuff that's coming out from the Id, and some of these you may be familiar with. We tend to use them in everyday language, another example of Freud's influence. There's displacement, where you redirect shameful thoughts to more appropriate targets. You can imagine a boy who hates his father, and that's really unacceptable, you shouldn't hate your father. So instead, he bullies another kid or kicks the dog. He turns his anger and his hatred towards his father to a more appropriate and more acceptable target. So, there's sublimation. Sublimation you take desires that are unacceptable and you displace them to more valuable activities. So for instance, somebody who has a strong sexual desires of forbiddens might devote a lot of energy to his or her work or studies. There's projection. Projection is reducing anxiety by taking these impulses you have that you're ashamed of and attributing them to somebody else. So, imagine a woman with strong homosexual desires, and because of how she was raised, her super ego tells her these are unacceptable, they're inappropriate. So she becomes unconscious of them. But she comes to believe that there are other women are sexually drawn to her. Or you may really dislike somebody you shouldn't dislike, and then come to a conclusion, "Oh my gosh, this person must hate me." Because your own shameful feelings are unacceptable, you will project them onto somebody else. There's rationalization, where you have certain anxiety-producing thoughts and you reason them away into more acceptable ways. So for instance, somebody might get pleasure, a father may get pleasure physically punishing his children. But nobody wants to think that of themselves. So the way he describes it to himself, the way he really believes it at the level of the self, the ego is that he's doing it for their own good. You know in general, a lot of the bad things we do, we rationalize. There's regression, and you see this in children where the idea is under certain forms of stress or stressful desires and stressful impulses from the Id, you might retreat to a mode of behavior that's characteristic of an earlier stage. So you see this in some sense a child might suddenly act like a much younger child. Finally, there's reaction formation which is cool and of unintuitive, where you replace threatening wishes and fantasies with their opposites. So you might express and finally say, "Oh, I love this person. This person is my favorite person." As a way to mask the fact that you really don't love them at all, in fact, you hate them. Now, these defense mechanisms proposed by Freud are just everyday life, we have them all the time. But sometimes, we fail to properly repress the impulses from the Id, and then you get into some real problems. You get what Freud called hysteria. Hysteria according to Freud are these symptoms which showed up quite often in Freud's time and maybe show up now only they're manifested in different ways, such as blindness and deafness without any physical cause, paralysis, tremblings, panic attacks, gaps of memory including amnesia and so on. For Freud, these are nothing more than symptoms. They're ways in which we keep our impulses, our memories, our desires under lock and key. We keep forbidden stuff under lock and key. The simplest example, for instance, is you had this horrible event, something you did, something you saw and you just can't cope with it, so you forget it. You have a form of amnesia, where you black it out. Freud believed that when these memories are recovered or when the impulses come to light, there's what he called catharsis, an explosive release, an emotional release of insight. So, then when you're treating these hysterical symptoms, you'd want to get to them through ways that could facilitate this catharsis, facilitate this understanding. Freud originally tried to get at this through hypnosis, but later on moved to free association, which is a tool that sometimes used. The idea of free association is you give somebody a word and he says something back, but because it's so speeded, they don't have time to censor it. Ideally, you get the true insight into what's working in their mind without the filtering powers that the ego and the super ego have. So, for instance, a fanciful example is, we're in a session and I say, "Dog," and you say, "Cat," and I say, "Lunch," and you say, "Sandwich," and I say, "Mother," and you say, "Sex." Well, and then you're embarrassed. You offer resistance. You say, "Oh, I didn't mean to say that." You don't go to your next appointment. You get angry at the therapist. This is part of the dance of psychoanalysis. Freud used these methods and many others to explore inner conflicts, and what goes on in psychoanalysis and its success at reading people is a topic that we're going to get to at the very end of this course.